Twenty years ago, Enron – the Texas company that famously imploded in accounting fraud – launched its “Ask Why” advertising campaign. When the commercials aired on channels like CNBC, viewers were bombarded with seemingly disconnected images that included everything from Ghandi to the NASA space shuttle. Music played in the background that Enron’s internal marketing literature described as both “urgent” and “haunting.” In other words, Enron’s “Ask Why” campaign was deeply weird.
Along with the images and music, the commercials featured artificially manipulated voices chanting the word “why.” From this odd din, an occasional declarative phrase would pop out. In one TV spot titled “Ode to Why,” a voice explained to the viewer that “why” was a “sharp and abrupt word, which can bring years of conventional assumptions to a jarring halt.”
Unlike many ad campaigns, Enron’s marketing people had apparently decided against an upbeat message, preferring a far more unsettled visual sensibility. Case in point: one commercial focused on a beleaguered man weighed down by a business suit made entirely out of metal.
The symbolism was, of course, hard to miss. As an article in the employee magazine explained, the metal suit was intended as a “metaphor for the conventional constraints that block change.”
It’s easy to by cynical about these ads. As many now know, not much about Enron seemed to be real, least of all its profits. For years, a number of financial and accounting schemes made Enron seem like a far healthier company than it actually was. When this fraud finally came to light in 2001, Enron quickly fell into bankruptcy, with jail sentences for its leadership soon to follow. Given this history, one might be tempted to dismiss the commercials as more evidence of the emptiness at the heart of the company. But in some ways, these odd little slices of television, and the history behind them, can tell us a lot about American business culture at the end of the twentieth century.
The television commercials were genuine expressions of Enron’s corporate culture. The team at Conquest (the advertising firm behind the campaign), began work for their client by interviewing Enron executives and developed the marketing strategy from this research. Consequently, the ad campaign mirrored a deep sense of purpose inside the company. As internal communications explained to employees, the commercials were meant to reflect Enron’s “restless dissatisfaction with the status quo and its ability to quickly grasp how most things can always be improved.”
While that statement was full of a brash confidence, recent experience seemed to justify such posturing. Under the leadership of Jeff Skilling in the early 1990s, the company had successfully developed complex financial instruments that could be used to buy and sell natural gas. Among the lessons the company’s leadership took from that triumpth was a conviction that the solution to a business problem could be found in unconventional approaches, instead of deep knowledge of any particular industry. In the years that followed, Skilling led Enron into markets such as wholesale electricity and Internet broadband. Fatefully, though, the company was unable to recreate its first success and hid its failures through fraudulent accounting.
Big Business as Radical Disruptors
Still, Enron became a celebrated business case study. In the late 1990s, business writers touted the Houston company’s freewheeling environment, where employees were given a lot of room to experiment and build new businesses. One management book described Enron as a “nuclear reactor” where workers frenetically bounced ideas off each other. In many ways, the “Ask Why” commercials offered viewers outward expressions of the corporation’s ostensibly radical approach to business.
“Ask Why” was not Enron’s first attempt at advertising, but earlier marketing efforts did not begin to approach the scope and ambition of the commercials that started airing on February 6, 2000. Ultimately, “ask why” was meant to “become the rallying cry of a new generation of business.” Certainly, the timing was right for a company like Enron to run ads that seemed more like manifestoes than anything else.
The rise of the Internet in the middle of the decade did more than introduce new technologies, but also ushered in a cultural revolution in American business. No longer the province of button-downed up-tight company men or sleazy Wall Street traders, business was now radical and anti-establishment. Clay Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma helped introduce “disruption” into the corporate executive’s vocabulary. In the pages of Wired magazine, writers were proclaiming “new rules” for a “new economy.” The very names business magazines that started publishing in the 1990s – Fast Company, eCompany Now, and Business 2.0 – all suggested the same sense of impatience with conventional wisdom that informed both the “Ask Why” campaign and Enron’s corporate culture. The Internet revolution in California may have been the center of the action, but the Texas company had no trouble fitting in.
However, if a booming stock market seemed to be proof that this new way of doing business had succeeded, there were problems growing beneath the surface. Business culture in the 1990s was awash in buzzwords and proclamations of revolution, but such excitement came at the expense of precise business strategies. It was all enough for the business school professor Michael Porter to warn about a drift away from concrete thought in the pages of the Harvard Business Review. In early 2001, Porter wrote that “words in the Internet lexicon” could “also have unfortunate consequences” such as “faulty thinking and self-delusion.” It is a deep irony that Jeff Skilling, the CEO who was largely credited for transforming Enron, was featured in a Business 2.0 cover story that ran as a rebuttal to Porter’s argument. As it turned out, Enron was the worst possible example one could offer in defense of this new business scene.
In fact, the lack of precision and “faulty thinking” that Porter wrote about had taken hold at the Texas company. For example, Enron’s 1999 annual report admitted that the company was “moving so fast that sometimes others” had “trouble defining” what it did – before suggesting that such confusion was actually a virtue instead of a concern. At the end of the decade, Skilling acknowledged (with some sense of satisfaction) that it was getting harder and harder to come up with a vision statement – that pithy explanation of a company’s ethos. Skilling told interviewers for a business school case study that meetings about a new vision statement tended to be wide ranging conversations that included “things about markets; things about new things; things about innovation;” and “things about creativity.” Ultimately, such a lack of clarity would be fatal.
In fact, the very same month that the Harvard Business Review ran Porter’s essay, Fortune magazine published an article questioning Enron’s high stock price alongside its penchant for “vague” and “grandiose” language. As 2001 wore on, the questions about Enron’s business grew, clearly taking a toll on Skilling. In fact, the increasingly embattled executive publicly called a skeptical equity analyst an “asshole.” (Claiming exhaustion, Skilling himself would resign from the company that summer). After that incident, a few Enron workers had shirts printed that read “ask why, asshole.” Such a defiant posture, though, was in retreat. Internal surveys revealed that many employees had lost faith in Enron’s “ask why” ethos. As one employee put it in 2001, “What people are defining as chaos now we would probably have defined as creativity and entrepreneurship a year ago. But the bloom is off the lily right now.”
The Fall of Enron
The real turning point, though, arrived in October 2001, when Enron’s management announced a billion dollar loss. From there, the series of derivatives deals that were moving losses, assets, and debts on and off the company’s balance sheet became public knowledge. Enron completely fell apart by the end of the year, becoming (for a time) the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Perhaps inevitably, the inherent drama of those final months transformed Enron into an iconic example of white collar crime.
The company’s swift demise might have been a shock to some; but the hints of impending collapse can be found in one of the commercials from the “Ask Why” campaign. With the high-pitched “whys” humming in the background, the ad opens on equity analysts from investment banks taking their seats in a drab, windowless hotel meeting room to hear a presentation from some fictional company’s management team.
In the bathroom, a nervous CEO practices delivering the bad news about the stock’s performance. Staring into the mirror, he tries out a smile that might be appropriate to the moment – contrite, but also pleasant and calm – before delivering the line: “This was a challenging fiscal year for the company.” In keeping with the unsettling aesthetic that typified the entire campaign, the commercial cuts to metal ducks moving along in a shooting gallery. Soon, the CEO’s head appears in the row before being knocked down by a shooter the viewer never sees.
Watching the commercial, two decades after it first aired, it’s easy to imagine Jeff Skilling, instead of that fictional executive, staring into that bathroom mirror. Much like the vignette in the commercial, Enron’s leadership would soon have to do quite a bit of explaining to investors, stock analysts, journalists, and prosecutors. In those last desperate months of the company’s existence, perhaps Skilling realized all the ways in which the same business culture that he and others at Enron had so completely embraced in the “Ask Why” campaign had helped push the company towards “faulty thinking” and, finally, its own demise.
About the Author: Gavin Benke is the author of Risk and Ruin: Enron and the Culture of American Capitalism, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018, and a Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University. His current book project explores corporate visions of the future in the second half of the twentieth century. Follow him on Twitter: @GavinBenke
Cover Photo: James Nielsen/Getty Images